Data visualization is integral to any Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) task. However, generating visualization requires expertise, presenting a steep learning curve and a significant cognitive load. Natural language interfaces for EDA aim to lower this barrier by allowing users to generate visualizations through natural language queries. However, complexity remains when EDA is performed collaboratively, requiring an environment to support multi-user interaction. In this thesis proposal, we discuss challenges in user-system interaction in a collaborative multi-user setup, such as errors in visualization generation due to misinterpretation of user requests. We hypothesize that a Conversational Assistant (CA) capable of understanding user-initiated clarification requests and generating accurate responses can improve user experience and support collaborative EDA tasks. To this end, we propose to develop such a CA (Figure tab:system_issues) and evaluate it through a user study, thus examining its impact on user experience in a collaborative environment for EDA.

In the context of data visualization, as in other grounded settings, referents are created by the task the agents engage in and are salient because they belong to the shared physical setting. Our focus is on resolving references to visualizations on large displays; crucially, reference resolution is directly involved in the process of creating new entities, namely new visualizations. First, we developed a reference resolution model for a conversational assistant. We trained the assistant on controlled dialogues for data visualizations involving a single user. Second, we ported the conversational assistant including its reference resolution model to a different domain, supporting two users collaborating on a data exploration task. We explore how the new setting affects reference detection and resolution; we compare the performance in the controlled vs unconstrained setting, and discuss the general lessons that we draw from this adaptation.

Community question answering forums provide a convenient platform for people to source answers to their questions including those related to healthcare from the general public. The answers to user queries are generally long and contain multiple different perspectives, redundancy or irrelevant answers. This presents a novel challenge for domain-specific concise and correct multi-answer summarization which we propose in this paper.